Steve You addressed your opinion to Ben and Tim, but you indirectly addressed around 3 billion persons in the world in a public manner as well. I, for one, would like to respond to your words and sentiment, if I may?
You seemingly equate the limited opinion of man with the possible reality of a Creator of the universe (as we do not yet know it) without limits. Further, you seemingly judge the possible existence of a Creator of the Universe (as we do not yet know it) without limits on the hand of the limited faith and understanding of such persons. In addition, you argue that; because you can overcome the intellectual constraints of the limited faithful (in the sense of believing creation), therefore you may also limit the possibility of the existence of a Creator of the Universe (as we do not yet know it) without limits to the extent of denying the possibility in totality. That is not very scientific, to say the least. To be clear, by "without limits", all, nothing, and everything possible in between is included. Thus, a singular Creator of universal finity and infinity. It is considered theoretically true from the Christian perspective: Jesus told the disciples that they would not be able to imagine such a possibility, and it seems apparent they could indeed not understand what that meant either, and still don't. First, it is not believed that the creation creates the Creator. You have a basic error in your assumed existential order of somone else's faith. The faithful do not create the Creator of the universe without limits. I'd suggest you turned the cat around first, contemplate the possibility of it all, then argue again. Further, your argument does not allow for the existence of a superposition, where faithful could be both dead and alive, and everything in between. Yet, the theory in the book we learn from (in the sense as the believed possible source of the written Word of God), supports that. Perhaps you are criticizing a source without having read it and/or understood it yourself? I'll take your challenge upon me. Come ask me as a Christian, as a believer in a Creator of the universe without limits, your vexing questions and we would both become further enlightened. But if you do not do so, then please refrain from publicly speaking so disrespectfully about such an Entity and the billions who believe, especially as it seems apparent that you have no agnostic reality of it - for your sake - for you may actually be severely limited in your opinion and faith about the same, as fellow creation, as entangled cosmic dust. "Seeing light is a metaphor for seeing the invisible in the visible, for detecting the fragile garment that holds our planet and all existence together. Once we have learned to see light, surely everything else will follow." http://articles.latimes.com/1993-07-25/magazine/tm-16606_1_brilliant-light/5 Robert Benjamin Date: Mon, 14 Sep 2015 20:07:34 -0700 Subject: Re: [agi] Machine faith From: steve.richfi...@gmail.com To: a...@listbox.com Ben and Tim, I've been trying my own experiments. There is a threshold in faith that I call extremism - where people claim that their writings and belief is all that is important - the ENTIRE word of God (though they have NO evidence that God said/wrote any of it). This view has a fatal flaw that is exhibited by showing them things that are NOT in their Torah, Bible, or Koran that are obviously more important than anything that is in there. Why would God leave such things out? What might be God's motives? How is that sort of God different that what we call a space alien? This causes a sort of brain short - they don't want to give up their opiate (of the masses), yet they have lost their confidence in their book. So far, the people I have done this with seem to be continuing in their faith while carefully blinding themselves to the fact that it makes no sense. BTW, there are MANY such things that can be pointed out - as we have Nobel Prizes for them. My two favorites are Reverse Reductio ad absurdum reasoning (especially effective for Christians, as why didn't their "Prince of Peace" show them this that is SO important for peace; and that our century-long lifespan is the product of selective breeding - we should be living for something like 600 years, so now, everyone dies as children. Please - try this for yourself, as our world is full of such small-minded people. A mind is a WONDERFUL thing to lay waste. Steve ================= On Mon, Sep 14, 2015 at 7:36 PM, TimTyler <t...@tt1.org> wrote: On 2015-09-14 21:59, Ben Goertzel wrote: This is a badly flawed analysis of religious faith, because religious peoples' minds are not operating according to probabilistic reasoning, at least not where matters related to religion are concerned. Faith is a sort of inner absolute certainty, but that doesn't translate into "certainty" in the sense of probability theory in any direct way... I'm inclined to facepalm at this point. This seem to me to be like saying that dogs don't solve quadratic equations when catching a ball. One one hand, it's trivially true, but on the other, it kind-of misses the point. Empirically, people with religious faith do not have a prior of 1.0 for their religious beliefs, since religious people are regularly unconverted or switch religions. Of course, you can plead that the ones who unconverted or switched religions didn't have "true faith" whereas others do, but I don't think such a claim would stand up to psycho-anthropological scrutiny... Sure, some people who profess absolute faith are kidding themselves - or others. It doesn't really matter in the context of my post. We can build and test Bayesian agents with priors of 1.0. I'm still interested in finding out whether people have seriously looked into this form of 'absolute faith' as a form of behaviour manipulation that could be used to control intelligent machines. -- __________ |im Tyler http://timtyler.org/ ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/10443978-6f4c28ac Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?&; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Full employment can be had with the stoke of a pen. Simply institute a six hour workday. That will easily create enough new jobs to bring back full employment. AGI | Archives | Modify Your Subscription ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
